Motorsports

Despite the uncertainty about his future - most likely tied to Ford with Nascar in the USA from 2011 - the speed and commitment he showed at Watkins Glen was top-drawer stuff.  His victory in the second-tier Nationwide series event was his hat- trick at the course and class and it took former F1 ace Juan Montoya to beat him in the Sprint Cup headline event. Ambrose probably would have been a stronger contender in the Sprint event with a better car and crew, as he was only 11th in qualifying and his Toyota Camry was far from perfect on the final run to the flag.  “I really drove the car into the ground today, every lap was like a qualifying lap, it’s so intense at the front of the field, and it was a lot of fun dicing with Juan in the middle of the race," Ambrose says.  “After the last round of pit stops, the handling of the car really went away, but it’s still a good result."  Ambrose knew he had the pace after the Nationwide win and admits his third win is a highlight of his time in the USA.  “Yesterday was without doubt the most satisfying win of my career, we’ve had a really tough year, and the results we’ve had this weekend really put the disappointing aspects of the season behind us." He was always the pace-maker in the Nationwide race after qualifying on pole position. He led 60 of the 82 laps and beat young gun Joey Logano, a regular oval-track winner in Nationwide. “To win three in a row here is pretty sweet; it’s a huge result for the team," Ambrose says.  “I’m saying goodbye to JTG Daugherty Racing at the end of the year, so it’s nice to score a win for them.” But, even after a first and a third, Ambrose is - as always - looking forward.  “We’re back to Michigan next weekend, it’s a track that I really like competing on, and I hope that the momentum we’ve gaining this weekend can roll on.” And it's not just about the next race, as he hints on a continued future in the USA despite rumours he might come home to resume racing in V8 Supercars.  "The NASCAR Sprint Cup is the most competitive form of motorsport in the world, it’s a very hard deal to win races here, but that’s what I’m here for, and we’re going to keep at it," Ambrose says.

SuperX organisers have announced that Reed's Kawasaki teammate, American Ryan Villopoto, will compete at the events.  Villopoto, 21, was leading the American supercross series with seven wins before he was forced out with a broken leg, while Reed last month pulled out of the American motocross series with glandular fever.  Both riders are expected to be fit for the SuperX series, starting in October.Villopoto will compete in the final two rounds at Parramatta Stadium, Sydney, on November 27 and Brisbane's on December 4. It will be the first time he has raced in Australia."The Sydney and Brisbane races are going to be the only major events I will race in before the 2011 AMA series so it's going to be great preparation for me and I'll be going for the win at both," Villopoto said.Other American supercross riders to compete in the series include Kevin Windham, Davi Millsaps, Mike Alessi and Justin Brayton. Kiwi Ben Townley, who is running third in the American motocross championship, will also compete.Super X seriesOctober 16: Newcastle, Energy Australia StadiumOctober 23: Canberra, Canberra StadiumOctober 30: Launceston, Aurora StadiumNovember 13: Auckland, North Harbour StadiumNovember 20: Dunedin, Carisbrook StadiumDecember 4: Brisbane, QSAC 

SIMON and Sue Evans are Australian Rally Champions for the fourth time after another convincing win, this time in Rally Queensland on the Sunshine Coast last weekend. The Subaru crew were never remotely challenged in a event which doubled as a round of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship, a category won by Indian driver Gaurav Gill. LUKE Youlden and James Moffat have had an endurance call-up from Ford Performance Racing. Youlden will pair with Mark 'Frosty' Winterbottom in the L&H 500 at Phillip Island and then Bathurst, while promising young Moffat will share a Falcon with Steven Richards. ITEM: SUPERBIKES will pair-up again with V8 Supercars during the flagshi L&H 500 meeting at Phillip Island next month. The two-wheelers will be   a support event on the pre-Bathurst, two-driver race program from September 10-12. CRASH-PRONE Finnish driver Jari-Matti Latvala scored the biggest win of his World Rally Championship career in Finland last weekend.  Latvala trumped the dominant Citroens of Sebastian Loeb and Sebastian Ogier to take victory in the 1000 Lakes with his Ford Focus. GLENN Seton continues his effort to win at Bathurst in partnership with Jason Bargwanna this year. Seton has signed to share a Kelly Racing Commodore with Bargwanna, a combination that has a total of 39 Bathurst starts - equal with Craig Lowdnes and Mark Skaife as the most experienced pairing at Mount Panorama in 2010. JOHN Martin continued his classy work in the Superleague Formula in Europe last weekend, scoring two wins from three starts at Brands Hatch in Britain. The Aussie, once part of the A1GP team run by Alan Jones, is racing for Beijing Guoan in an open-wheel series. MARCOS Ambrose was out of luck again in the latest round of the Sprint Cup in the USA, retiring early from the Pennsylvania 500. It was his third mechanical non-finish of the season and leaves him trailing in 28th position in the Nascar standings.. BRUCE Garland and Harry Suzuki are competing in Thailand this weekend with their Isuzu D-Max ute as part of their buildup to next year's Dakar Rally in South America. The pair will also tackle the Australasian Safari in Western Australia in September but are hoping for a win in the very different jungle conditions in Thailand.

GREG Murphy will share his Castrol Commodore with three co-drivers during the major enduro events in this year's V8 Supercar championship because of date clashes with his preferred partners.MARCOS Ambrose improved 20 positions from his starting spot in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis last weekend. It was only good enough for 21st place in the latest round of the Nascar championship. Jamie McMurray won the race. SCOTT Dixon scored a controversial IndyCar win in Edmonton, Canada, last weekend after Helio Castroneves was stripped of top spot by race officials for blocking his teammate, Will Power, on a restart. Power finished second.GLANDULAR fever has put a stop to motocross superstar Chad Reed's season in the US. After a battery of medical tests he has parked his Monster Kawasaki for the rest of 2010.JAY Marmont scored his third straight Australian Motocross title despite a 20-second penalty in one of the heats in the grand final in Queensland last weekend. Marmont managed third in Coolum on his Yamaha.

Our own Jack Brabham had just been crowned world F1 champion and would repeat the feat later that year, the first Ford Falcon went on sale and the very first Armstrong 500 (now the Bathurst 1000) and Australian Touring Car Championship (now the V8Supercar championship) were held. Over at Holden things were even better where it was dominating the market. More than 50 per cent of all cars sold in Australia in 1960 were Holdens, new plants were opening and the first left-hand-drive Holdens were made for export to Hawaii.  The face of Holden at this never-to-be-repeated peak for the company was the all-new FB model with its large rear fins, wraparound windscreen and the first acrylic paints. Of course, it still had the "grey" motor pumping out just 56kW of power (the current one-litre Indian built Suzuki Alto baby car puts out virtually the same 50kW) and there was no such thing as an automatic gearbox, but the FB would prove to be one of the biggest selling Holden models of all time. More than 170,000 FBs were made. Fast forward 50 years and the ravages of rust, crashes and time have written off more than 165,000 of them.  Sydney guitar shop owner Steve Jackson says there's barely 5000 left. But he's doing his bit. He and his six children own a whopping 36 FBs and the next year model upgrade version, the EK. On Sunday they will be taking 14 of them out to Clarendon to help celebrate the 25th All Holden Day. Thousands of fans will be at the Hawkesbury Showground where organisers expect more than 700 Holdens of various vintages to be on display. There's a swap meet tomorrow and Sunday as well. The day has a special meaning for Jackson and the FB pictured in Carsguide today.  He bought it at the 1989 All-Holden Day. "It had come from the original owner's family. She was a bank manager or a bank auditor who travelled around the banks in NSW."  The car came complete with extensive documents of every service and many of the trips the original owner made in her time with the car. When he bought it had 78,000 miles on the clock. That's now up to 130,000 though the car spends much of its time in storeage.  However he keeps it registered so he can continue to use the original number plates. Jackson is the president and longest-standing member of the FB/EK car club of NSW.  He says he came into contact with the FB model at an early age and his fondness has grown into an obsession. "I have been obsessed with the shape. My uncle bought one as new in 1960."  He has a large FB van on the sign outside his Parramatta Rd shop and has used FB panel vans as delivery vehicles. "I bought my first Holden at 14 or 13. It wasn't an FB, it was a HD Holden. I came out from school and it was across the road for sale for $30. I bought it much to my dad's horror."  Despite its big sales the FB has over the years been in the shadows of the 1961 EK that replaced it. The EK introduced the first automatic transmission in a Holden, better quality interior trim and more modern paintschemes.  More have survived.  "More women drove the EK because of the autos," Jackson says.  The rarest FBs are the panel vans, Jackson estimates that only five per cent of the FB run were vans and only a handful remain.  Also rare are the cars made in the first six months of 1960 - those without the acryclic paintwork. When Holden changed over, the actual shades of colour were different. So some of the early two-tone shades such as pink and grey and yellow and beige are the collectable ones.  The FBs will be joined by another retro classic at the show, the hot purple Holden Efijy show car that was debuted at the Sydney motor show in 2005. The hot rod has since won major awards. Holden now occasionally brings it for car shows.

The four-time Bathurst winner was hitting speeds up to 190km/h in his first hit-out in the vehicle before it all came unstuck.  "We went into a rut and hit a bank and gently rolled over on my side doing about 40km/h," Lowndes said as he surveyed the damaged vehicle at LandCruiser Mountain Park, Jimna, north-west of Brisbane. He and his navigator, 13-time Safari veteran Kees Weel, were not injured in the incident, but the vehicle was retired for the day.  Weel said Lowndes was quickly up to speed and was still one of the top chances to win the rally, even though it is his first off-road race. "It's good to get a roll out of the way before the event," he said.  "It's better than when we rolled out of the rally two years ago when we were leading it on the first day." Lowndes said he wanted to go one better than his mentor, Peter Brock, who scored three second places in the Safari.  With Weel's PWR Racing team now facing extensive repair work, Lowndes will now only get one more trial run in the car at Mildura, a couple of weeks before the rally starts in Perth on September 17. "Up until the roll, it was going strong and I was getting used to the big torque of the engine and using a taller gear to pull out of the corners," Lowndes said.  "So we got something accomplished today, but it's a shame it finished so early." Weel said Lowndes had the ability to read the terrain and was "up to speed straight away".  "In this event you don't win by seconds but by minutes and it comes down to preparation and who has the least amount of trouble out there," he said.

The Gold Coast racer announced today (WED JULY 28) that he is splitting from his JTG Daugherty Racing NASCAR team at the end of this year.  "I would like to continue in NASCAR and finish off what I started, but I have not discounted returning to Australia," Ambrose said in a press statement. His Australian media manager, Mark Walker, said there was a chance of Ambrose returning to V8 Supercars as well as options to stay on in the US.  "The hot tip is that he could sign with Richard Petty Motorsports replacing Kasey Kahne or Elliott Saddler," he said. "There are options over there and options over here, but nothing planned at the moment.  "We'll be talking about it in the next couple of weeks." Walker said that if the former Ford driver did return, he had several options with Ford and Holden teams that had not yet signed drivers for 2011.  "He's been driving a Toyota for the last couple of years so there's no magic allegiance there anymore," he said. Ambrose has been with JTG Daugherty Racing for five years, competing in the Truck Series, Busch Series, Nationwide Series and the premier division Sprint Cup the past two seasons.  His best result was an eighth in the Busch Series in 2007. He is currently 27th out of 72 competitors. Ambrose was the 2003/04 V8 Supercars champion driving a Ford for Stone Brothers Racing on the Gold Coast.  SBR manager Ross Stone said it was "highly unlikely" that Ambrose would return. "I believe he's close to signing with another team over there," he said.  "I think that's a real long shot (that he will return). "I'm going over in two weeks' time and I'm pretty sure that the next deal is done over there." Ambrose said he would complete this NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season.  "I will do everything I can to help JTG Daugherty transition into next year with their new driver," he said.  "After five years, I personally felt it was time for a change.  "I have no firm plans of what will come next for me and my career."  Team owner Tad Geschickter said he was disappointed to see Ambrose leave.  "Marcos is a friend and he is a great talent, he will be an asset to his next team," he said.  "While we hate to see him move on at the end of the season, we will remain focused on winning races with Marcos." Launceston-born Ambrose has recorded four top-five and nine top-10 finishes with JTG Daugherty Racing in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and won two Nationwide Series races.  His career-best Cup finish is a second-place finish at Watkins Glen International last season. Become a fan of Carsguide on Facebook

I might not be racing a car, but I'm racing around doing a lot of PR as are most of the drivers.  And the teams are also playing catch up on work, plus catch-up on a well-deserved break.Our workshop has plenty of work to do building a brand new race car for Skaifey and me for Phillip Island in September and Bathurst in October.  The benefit of this break is that we can also rotate our staff through some holidays to catch up with some well-deserved rest because they worked right through Christmas last year to get our new Holdens built.  So we basically have a skeleton crew on all the time at our Banyo headquarters.Mark is really excited about the new race car.  We both have to get comfortable in the car which is difficult for him and me because he has longer legs and a shorter torso than me.So getting the seat, steering wheel and pedals in a comfortable position for both of us will end up as a bit of a compromise.  I will have to stretch a bit more to the pedals, but I'll be closer to wheel.We drove together for HRT in 1999 and had a two-stage steering column we could push or pull about an inch, which is something our team is looking at.  Obviously you can't change the seat which is anchored down, so our legs will be a bit compromised for space, but we've got away with it in the past.Speaking of car-building, it's good to see V8 Supercars has now started building two prototypes to iron out any problems before the teams start building their race cars.  It's definitely a good concept and will make racing cheaper.However, with the chassis and components identical and only different Ford and Commodore shells, there is some skepticism among the fans about retaining that all-important Ford-Holden rivalry.  The teams will also have a challenge coming to terms with some of the technical issues such as the 100kg lighter weight and independent rear end.I hear they are thinking of staying with the spool diff, but having a custom housing so we can swap in a Detroit Locker or Salisbury. Interesting to hear that we may get those options for varying circuits and conditions.Our team, along with FPR, HRT and SBR have been testing various diffs to get the feel of where they work and where they don't, how they hook up and how they change the feel of the car.  Either has its pros and cons. It doesn't matter to me which one they go with.We've given our feedback and now it's up to the category to make their decision.  The idea is to allow more passing, particularly for drivers to dive down the inside into a corner and still have enough turn to be able to avoid running into the side of the car they are passing.All drivers are scared of that because you don't want to gain a place only to cop a points penalty through contact.  The other reason for the possible change of diff is to minimise the amount of damage our cars are doing to the tracks.The initial cost of all the car of the future changes will be huge, but in the long term it will be cheaper on running costs.  It should also make it safer with bigger wheels and brakes, and lighter cars.I was surprised and delighted at the weekend to see that Valentino Rossi has made a comeback to MotoGP just weeks after breaking his leg.  The sport really needs a charismatic rider like him and it was almost a fairytale comeback with a fourth place, denied of a podium by our very own Casey Stoner.No doubt he would have had the best doctors, best prep and best recovery, but it still takes an enormous  amount of personal courage and talent to come back so quickly after the biggest accident of his career and then to perform so well.  What a star.I'll also see a few F1 stars when my wife, Nat, and I fly to Europe for the Spanish GP in August.  However, I'm a little disappointed because I have to fly home before the Sunday race for a rookie day and test day the next week.  It would have been nice to see Mark Webber win another race, but at least we will be there for the practice and qualifying.

WARREN Luff led a runaway win by the Ralliart Mitsubishi team in the first Australian 6-Hour enduro at Eastern Creek in Sydney last weekend. Luff put his Lancer Evo X on pole position and then he and Stuart Kostera romped away to win by more than two laps from Ralliart teammates Inky Tulloch and Steve Jones, with Peter Conroy and Mark Bram third in another Evo X.WILL Power stretched his lead in the IndyCar World Series with another win last weekend, this time on the Toronto street course in Canada. His fourth victory of the year came in a race of carnage, as he led home his closest championship challenger, Dario Franchitti, with Ryan Hunter-Reay third.THREE teams from the Fujitsu V8 Supercar championship will step up to the "main game'' with wildcard entries for the Phillip Island and Bathurst endurance events this year. Matthew White Motorsport, Greg Murphy Racing and Sieders Racing Team have been granted the wildcard starts.LE MANS winner Vern Schuppan lived a dream when he returned to the French track to race a 1960s Porsche 917 in this year's Classic race meeting. Schuppan won for Porsche in 1983 driving a 956, but stepped back into the 917 -- star of the Steve McQueen movie Le Mans - to share with another former race winner, Richard Attwood. The pair were third in their category across the Classic weekend.AN INJURED left arm has forced three-time world champion Jason Crump out of the Australian team for the speedway world cup in Europe from July 24-31. Crump is having surgery on his biceps and plans to return at the Scandinavian Grand Prix on August 18 as he continues his world title defence.TWO more drivers have been confirmed for next year's Formula One season. Scuderia Toro Rosso has re-signed youngsters Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari for another year.AMBITIOUS youngsters should make a case to CAMS soon for next year's Rising Star Program. Applications have opened and, with graduates including John Martin, James Davison and Tim Blanchard, the program is going well. Applications close on Friday, October 29. Nomination forms are at www.amsf.org.au

The current champion will have more surgery on his left arm so he can continue his world title defence at the Scandinavian Grand Prix on August 18, but will miss the July 24-31 World Cup tournament in which Australia finished second last year behind Poland. Crump, who has been a member of the Australian team since the World Cup began in 2001, said he was "bitterly disappointed" to miss the tournament. He injured his bicep in a race last September, but still claimed his third world title a month later. "The reality is that my arm should have been a little further along in its recovery process by now," he said. "My preference was to wait until the end of the season but my doctors would prefer to check and see if there is an issue sooner rather than later." Crump is currently third in the world title chase.